P.J. Vatikiotis interview

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO
AUC HISTORY ON TAPE .
P.J. Va+ikiotis
Interviewed by Dr. Lawrence R. Murphy, January 6, 1973.
Murphy: This is an interview with Professor P.J. Vati kiotis.
It is recorded in his room at the Garden City House on January 6, 1973. The interviewer is Lawrence R. Murphy, Professor.
Vatikiotis, who was a student at the American University in Cairo is now a noted historian of the Middle East at the School of African and Oriental Studies, London University.
Vatikiotis: Now I came to AUC—I joined, 1 enrolled—in 1944
in the autumn, and at that time, of course, the war had receded from North Africa so that this particular part of the world was no longer in danger from the Axis. The war was already in Sicily and in Europe, Western Europe. There were perhaps thirty or thirty-five entering freshman that year. I would say the vast majority, about 80%, were not Arabic speaking. By that I don't mean they did not speak Arabic, but they were foreigners. A large contingent, one of the largest contingents, of Greeks had come in. I'd say about twelve to fourteen, some still in uniform. There were some Armenians, The Greeks were mainly from Abbott School, except for me who had come from an English public school in Palestine. There were several English Mission School from Cairo, and English School, a few Lycee, and many, of course, Armenian high school people.
I would say that the enrollment was evenly divided. In those days there was no choice of courses. You took a Social Science course degree, or degree course. You took a Science degree course;2
that is math, physics, chemistry, etc. You took a Journalism course. And that was it. We did have certa i n papers in common, that is certain subjects that we all had to take, like we all in Freshman year took chemistry; that was compulsory. We all had to take English. The difference, of course, between then and now is that those of us who had come from English schools were quite literate in English. Those who had come from the Greek schools, of course, were not as proficient. Even the people from the lycee were fairly prof i cient in Eng I!sh. I recaI I that wo took an aciuaI course in English writing, both in terms of essay writing and ‘whatever else is Involved, tie took a course In the English and American short story, which was a IIterature course. I suppose, and I recall that the people who taught us these were Leila Doss, who had just come down from Oxford, or had come down from Oxford, I think, before that, and Schuman, the man who eventually wrote a novel after his stay here called Cairo Concerto. Vie all took a basic philosophy course with a man called Smith, who subsequently retired and went to Wooster College in Ohio. Smith was an Englishman born in Tunis, attractive man, married to an American, with one daughter. Yet a very-rigid man, terribly religious, but extremely shrewd. Lousy for a philosophy professor or teacher, because he could take no argument. And this we found rather enervating, or annoying, and many of us who had come from the Greek background, especially having been to Greek high school, had had philosophy and were used to be able to corner him once in a while. And I remember hefd flush, turn terribly red, and get very argumentative, and try to shout us down.The other fixture in the University was a magnificent teacher, who was very very wise but must have stopped reading twenty years before we arrived, was a man called Marcel Kiven, the Belgian. He taught all the so-called economics, and what-have-you throughout the col Iege. Kiven was—there was an amb i volent relationship with Kiven. The students liked him, yet liked him in a superficial way.
Then there was that great character from Sweden. Madame Berg, and I must say, although Berg, being old from the University of Upsala and somewhat decrepid at that time, must have been a beautiful woman in her day. Was extremely well read in the history of political thought. And it is unfortunate that many students used to take her as a joke, but I might say that 1 got my first interest in the study of politics from Madame Berg.
The other difficulty was that here were all these foreigners, they had to take Arabic somehow, because it was something to do, of course, with the situation of the University in the country. Most people who came from English schools had taken Latin; I had taken Arabic, a lot of the students, of course, from the Lycees, from the foreign schools, from the Armenian school, and so on^ knew how to speak Arabic, and perhaps knew how to make out the alphabet and read a few words, but they were not proficient in Arabic. And this was the joke of the college. They'd send them to these various special classes, led or taught by people like Sheikh Ahmed, who was legendary, and so on. And they did damn all, really.
So we had a situation where the Oriental Studies school was teaching Arabic beautifully to a I I these outsiders, you know, or people who were specializing in Oriental study, and yet the actual students4
enrolled regularly in the college could not take proper Arabic teaching, or do proper Arabic study, basicaI Iy because they were not interested in it.
So in brief, really, you had a largely foreign body of students, which was joi ned every year at the j uri i or I eve I by a I I these little Egyptian girls who had gone to the American College for Women, usually daughters of fairly well-to-do people. They were Muslims and ex-Copts who had been converted by English or American missionaries to the more sanitized, sanitary Puritanical form of western Protestantism, where, of course, money and power lay, from the less sanitary and rather Oriental rite of the Coptic church. So these were basically the two lots of women we'd get from the American girls college. The girls who came from the English school and the English Mission School were far more intelligent, less formal education, but more literate, and much, much brighter, really. We even had an A.T.S. with us, that year,
Clarette Zukermann. She had served in the British army, was an older girl, who is now, of course, a prominent person in Israel. Her husband is the leading economic analyst and columnist of Haarif (?) newspaper called Schwartz, and she is, I think, Director of the League of Women for Israel.
There were one or two Turks whom I can't remember. There was a magnificent poet from South Arabic, the Yemen, the editor of the lead­ing newspaper in Aden, Ali Lukman, his brother Ibrahim, who subsequently became a senior civil servant in the British period in Aden. There was a rather splendid chap from Uganda, from Makerere before Makerere became a University but was only a school, Justin Zangandu Zake, who subsequently became an anthropolog ist trai ned in Ch icago.At that time the first batch of American short-termers began to arrive. Schuman, Morris, Riley, Howard Root in Philosophy from California, Harrell Beck eventually, Bud Bloomquist who played more basket ball than teach—I think he taught public speaking or some such nefarious thing--but there was always of course, Worth Howard, who took a generic interest in everything, but who eventually taught a class in drama; drama things like Ibsen and so on. Morris taught eighteenth and nineteenth century English literature, and was quite good at it. Schuman was too drunk to teach; he was an alcoholi by then. Badeau taught us philosophy eventually, and it wasn't very good philosophy, because basically he was a theological seminary pro­duct, but he was a very, very good teacher.
I cannot say anything about the Arabic teachers, because I didn't take Arabic at the college. I went elsewhere.
Now we also began to receive then many Palestinian students.
They did not increase in number until after the war. I would say about ’45, '46 they came in force. Jordanians began to come in force. We had many Ethiopians. And the Palestinians, of course, became an i dent i f i abIe group because of what was going on in Pa Iestine The fact remains that the proportion of Egyptian students in my time from '44 to '48 remained very smaI I.
Now most of the foreigners who came to AUC, if they were resi­dents of Egypt. I suppose, came because they couIdn't go to Europe in 1944, not that easily, or overseas. Secondly, because obviously coming from schools like the English school, lycee, the Armenian school, they couldn't without a Tawgihiyya very easily go into one of the Egyptian state universities. As for the Arabs who came, if they were Egypt i ans, they may have been peopIe who could afford thefees, people who may not have had the required cumulative mark average to get into the Egyptian university.
The girls, I suppose, who came from the American girls college, they just carried in thi s sort of exported American educat ionaI pattern. The Palestinians and, let us say, the Western Arabs who came, one might ask why they didn’t go to the AUB. Well the AUB was terribly expensive. Beirut itself was expensive. They may not have had a place there, and basically for such reasons, although most of them were moneyed. In other words, they were not people who had financial difficulty. I came basically because it was, Cairo was, the cheapest place to live in the Middle East. I had a free ticket on the raiI ways, first class, because of my father having been a civil servant in the Mandate Government in Palestine. That meant that the trip was free through the desert of Sinai. I think I must have lived on a maximum of three pounds a month in those days, and Cairo to me was the, in terms of culture and tradition, and I don’t mean modern Cairo,
Soliman Pasha and Kasr el Nil but Islamic Cairo, really was the re­presentative city of the Islamic world, a I though one can argue in those days Damascus was one, too. It was a place tolearn Arabic be­yond the point which I had reached. And as I say, I suppose, if Europe were open to us then, few of us would have thought of coming to the American University in Cairo.
And I suppose there is also a sub-conscious reason. Those of us who followed the news, those of us who were I iterate enough to read, realized or rather foresaw that the academic bonanza was going to open up in one direction, and that meant the United States.And it's rather uncanny that most of my generation of students from the AUC somehow or other went that way. This is, they went to America either for a short period of permanently. I was one of the ones who went there permanently, only to leave America for England again permanently sixteen years later. But it is true to say that most of us got fellowships or some arrangement or other and went to America after, because the degree from AUC for some reason or another was recognized in the United States while it wasn’t recognized in Egypt.
Let me give you, for instance, some examples of what happened to these students. A man like Balidjian (?), probably the brightest member of our undergraduate years, became eventually a consulting chemical engineer in America. He was apparently a brilliant mathematician and chemist, and I think he and I were the youngest members of the entering Freshman year. I was 16 and he was 16, but I can't remember what the difference in months was, in birthdays.
Ida Chivarjian (?) an Armenian from Cairo, whose parents owned the flour mills in Egypt, was also I think was young as we were. She is now either headmistress or deputy headmistress of one of the largest comprehensive schools in Surrey in England. She was also, It seems,
3 brilliant mathematician. She came from the English Mission School. Ricky Mihaeiof (?), whose father had a biological laboratory, a bio-chemical laboratory, here, she ended up, I believe, in Switzerland. I don't know what she's done with her life, but she was very able. Clarette Zuckermann, the A.T.S. girl, was extremely able, she was in the Social Sciences. George Kakouris (?) whose father was a grocer in Sakakini, opposte the American Girls College, is now the leadinglibrarian in Greece. He went to Chicago after AUC and was trained in library science, after having taken a degree in physics and math.
The same I would say app!ies to people like Richard Aiey, who went to Britain, not to Ameri ca, and qua Ii f i ed as a chemical eng i neer. from the Un i vers i ty of London, and is now a chartered chemi caI engi neer in Milan, the President of an environment and pollution company,
The other day, walking in the Muski here in Cairo, I ran into a chap I hadn't seen since we came down from the college in 1948, a man called Boulos Abd-iI-Matik, one of the genuine Egyptian Copts, who went to America, and worked for Voice of America for many, many years. He took a journalism degree, and he is now the first secretary in charge of the press at the American Embassy in Beirut. Boulos was apparently a successful journalist as far as the Voice of America is concerned, and eventually joined the American foreign service.
Several other people: Gerald Arthun (?) who eventually married
Ida Chivarjian, who is also in Surrey, a Senior French master of a school. He and Morgnello, an Italian boy from Cairo, were, I think the champions of you I a due (?) in Egypt in 1945 and '46 and they were on the national team of you I a huit, the rowing team of eight.
He's now, Morinello, managing Air Canada in the north of Italy.
There was a problem in the sense that here we were in an American university. Most of us were diverse foreigners, but the common language was, of course, French.
The library in those days was terribly small. It was where this student cafeteria is now on the main campus—coffee shop, or whatever it is. And I remember there was one chap there whose still w i th the I i brary, Nicola Geo rge, who was on the c i rcuI at ion desk.
Behind him sat this man who was like the owl of Minerva, called Kamal, who used to do the catalogueing, and sort of once in a while shoutat all of us because we were either sort of fondling the girls or talking loudly. But I must say that the few books that existed were very well read.
There were contingents of Greeks from Suez and from Port Tewfiq, the whole canal area, all of whom, I would say, without exception, went overseas as professionaIs or became professionaIs mainly in the applied sciences. Some of them became lawyers. There was one chap, I remember, from Jerusalem, a Jew called Amnon Corkidy (?) who took a journalism degree and now, I understand, is a millionaire twice over in America by having changed his name to Barnes. Fuad el Hussainy, who entered with us, from the Hussainy family in Jerusalem, the mufti's family, but remotely related to it. After '48 joined the foreign service of Saudi Arabia, and I ran into him in Rabat two years ago as the Minister Plenipotentiary of Saudi Arabia in Morocco.
So that there is no doubt that this was a transient place for these people. To this extent one might say that the function of AUC in those days was an original function. It gave people the kind of window, which was a totally new window, in con+rast to the long­standing French window, that the Egyptians had. The British have had their exported public schools here like Victoria, English School Heliopolis, and so on, but they never had a university-level outfit, or semi-university level. One thing one observes is that the vast majority of people, especially the males, who went to AUC in the war years and the immediate post-war years have, I think, because of the accident of the second world war, been people who had to be purposeful. In other words, they had to go do something and get out. This having been the case, most of them have endec up doing something.
Many of us would look back and regret that the qualify and level
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of the college curriculum was not as it should have been. On the other hand, we did not regret this, as I say, transient or transformational function that-the college performed, or played.
One notices, for instance, in the case of Flora Risk, who was with us. Her father was the Bursar or the Cashier, whatever it was at the college. She eventually became a leading personality in the field of Middle Eastern studies as they were beginning in America in the '50s when the financial bonanza — you know in American universities, creating programs and all the wasted money since that time which produced a very small ball of string, with regard to who knows the Middle East and who doesn't. Flora is the girl who helped organize one of the best and leading Middle East collections at Widener (?) under Gibb.
One recalls that there was this almost automatic, subconscious, dynamism that when one finished AUC one left, crossed the sea, crossed the ocean—sometimes one didn't cross the ocean, stayed in Europe~--and left.
Now there was also the environment within which all this occurred. Palestine for the Palestinian Arabs was no more; there­fore, they couldn't go back there. Some of them tended to populate the civil service positions and let us say advisory positions in the up-and-coming Arab states, let us say in the peninsula or else­where. Other things were happening in Egypt. Those of us who had the slightest perceptiveness could see that as far as the foreign communities were concerned in Egypt, the game for them was up. That they would have to face up to a phenomonen which, although it began to gain momentum in the 19th century, culminated in our time in a sort of horizontal integration of everything, the liberation move-merit, which swept everything in its way, and tended to sweep those who either could not, of course, either assimi!ate or tolerate the new conditions. So the second accident of the environment, the trends that were occurring in, let us say, Egypt itself and other Middle Eastern countries, tended to push these foreigners outside, never to return.
One would also suspect that the young Americans who came as short- termers here, right after the war, were in my view to put it frankly and bluntly a greater asset to the college than—let me put it this way— than the short-termers that have been coming in the last tenyears. For hefvery simple reason that they had no motivation of professional advancement. The war was over. A lot of them had been in the war.
They came purely and simply to teach for three years, and also enjoy themselves. So their teaching was, of course, varied. But some of them like Harrell Beck, Howard Root, Schuman, alcohol or no a I coho I, were bloody good. Morris was excellent. There were people who had the time to read, and because they read, of course, they had something to say in class. When I say they had no professional advancement motives, in other words they had not been professionalized yet. Whereas, the youngsters 'who come today, they come either because it's very difficult to get a post in a good university in America or because they think this will lead them into something called an expertise on the Middle East, to take back to selI it like good con artists, for instance, or bad con artists, to some unsuspecting small college or university in America, This means that they have to 'work in something which gives the appearance of research, but which is not quite research.
In this sense, I would say the place has lost something. Mind you, to be fair, the environment today precludes the kind of openness that a short-termer had in those days.12
As for the over-administrative superstructuring of the uni­versity, that, too, is a loss, although it was an i nevi tab Ie de­velopment. I never saw paper going around in my days. People would do things by word of mouth. One could see Howard walking around the small grounds of that old campus, you see, telling people what was going to happen next afternoon, or thereabouts. Now I suppose there is more of a formal or formalistic structure, by people who really have no genuine interest in Egypt or in AUC.
The old-timers like Howard, who died last year, like Vandersall, whose still living, or Ii ke Cl el I and, who died also earlier this year, was that they were here for the duration. They painted the place.
They swept the place. They worked in it. In other words, this was their life job; they were dedicated to the place. They may have been limited in their capacities, both intellectual and academic abilities. Nevertheless....
I think they may have misjudged the temperment of my generation. One must bear in mind that a lot of these people came out because they were inclined towards a missionary kind of activity. They were good people, and yet they were still of the generation that felt they had "the word". They were not obnoxious about this. There were compulsory assemblies with the odd prayer, the odd lesson, the odd preaching. I would suggest, not untastefully done, not clumsily done. It was a means of communication in those days. It was a means, let's say, for myseIf and some other bloke to go in with a gi rlfriend and sort of sit snugly together in the back of Ewart Hall. And yet this hung in the background. I myself, to some extent, resented this, because I knew that they had never converted a Muslim or a Jew to Christ­ianity. They always converted people from other Christian rites.13 -
1 don't think themselves had ever done any conversion. It was clear in the case of people like Badeau, less in people like Howard, whereas VandersalI and Neva, himself, Van and Neva were extremely devout and religious people. They were so shy and yet too pleasant, genuine and helpful, that one didn't mind their religiosity, which could have been, of course, oppressive.
Van ran a glee club, which at sometime, at least in my years, was at its peak, splendid group. Wadat Said was in it, myself and a few others. Neva gave us all our immunizations. She was a registered nurse, as well as sometimes doubling as a vice squad, or a one-woman vice squad to make certain that we weren't dabbling with all the little virgins on the campus.
And yet the girls who were with us were more mature as women than they are today, I think. They had character. They had personality,
Some of them were physically attractive. But basically most of them quite intelligent. Oh, there was the odd stupid one.
Vandersall became a legend for two things: his straight-forwardness,
and his awkwardness. He never let anyone down, once he had given him his word, because Vandersall did everything in this college. One time he was even registrar. He'd brew his own coffee when he and Neva would have their brown-bag lunch in the chemistry laboratory, 1 believe, no the physics laboratory. And across the way was old Selim Salaama, God rest his soul, who was the technician in charge of the chemistry lab­oratory. And you'd ask him "what's your name", and he'd say "Sleem Sima".
Naamani was always in the wings somewhere, fixing his racing form every morning, chain smoking, and eyeing the women. .14
VandersalI taught a beautiful course, literally beautiful course, after he'd come back from having worked as one of the myriad scientists or physicists on the Manhattan project. He taught a course called The History of Science, which I think is no longer taught at AUC—a rather stupid, retrogressive step— all of us had to take the History of Science, and now that I teach the odd seminar on the relationship between the Philosophy of Science and politics, find that a lot of things, before I started reading philosophy of science, that I remmbered came from VandersalI's course.
He kept on looking at his watch and the clock in a lecture, theatre room really, in the back of the old building where the laboratories were, and the class began always on the hour, and when the hour was up to the second, he'd shut the rooftof the door. Anyone who walked in after he had shut the door was simply not allowed entry. VandersalI also ran the Geological Club, andhe'd take people all over the place, Sakarra, the Mokattum, you name it, looking for all kinds of granite and basalt and what have you. Wadat Said was one of his great friends and admirers. I mean, he liked Wadat so much that we were afraid that he was really infatuated. He used to call her "Gazelle" because Wadat was a good walker. One would go to his home for dinner or for lunch, and he'd suddenly, know know, his eyes would water, and he'd get flush in the face, and bring out this dusty, ancient little record—worn out, an old '78 probably done in the '20s— and he'd put it on this little grinder, and low and behold, his Wooster College song would come on, and he would sing. VandersalI would always begin conducting--before he'd conduct the glee club— whether it was rehersa I or something else, he always kept time withhis thumb, andhe literally was the man that one can say he was alI thumbs, because he was so shy his two thumbs were IiteraI Iy up.
Howard, was a great garden party giver. He was invoIved with Music and the Arts. Actually the secretary of Music and the Arts during the war, right after the war, was my wife, or the girt who is now my wife, who was with the British Council then. He knew myriads of British officers during the war: he'd organize concerts and theater
for them, plays, He read the Christmas Story every Christmas, when we had a huge dinner, practically with black ties; yes, it was with black tie. 1 mean the Christmas Story, the Dickens story. Muriel would arrange the flower pots, and Muriel would play the piano. Muriel would fix the banan bread. Muriel would always be in the background. She was a retiring, reserved, retieient woman, of great personality and character. I understand that she and Howard met when when one day Howard as a youngster went to her home to sell her a temperance.
In 1946-47 Muriel's niece, an Ann Sprague, the daughter of Muriel's brother Wendell, from an unknown little small town up in upstate New York came to spend the year with them. She was a sophomore andsomehow, i met this girl, and thought that it would be a good idea for her to see Egypt that year. I saw a lot of the Howards then, whenever I'd go either to take Ann back in the small hours of the morning or pick her up in the early hours of the evening.
And I recall on the 6th of May, 1947, it was the anniversary of Farouk's accession to the throne. They used to always have beautiful lights on the bridges. The Nile was magnificent that night. And Ann had asked whether I would show her the lights, and I said that I'd gladiy do so. In those days I was living in diggs in a pension called Litoral above the Metro cinema really or just before,K -
run by a Madame Usa, some Italian woman. And my roommate was a boy called seorge I I 1 ades(?) , pro car; I v the most sifted, talented a t h I ete to have come to ABC. He subsequent I y wen r fo Co I umb i a, Missouri and stayed there. ?~e? s st‘II there, he was dating the daughter ef an American naval casta * n, wno was need of NAMRU. Her name was Marilyn, someth inn or other, Spencer or some such Thing, They wanted to go to hetcinema tnat night, and George asked me if I wanted tickets, I sale no at first, Ha If an hour later, he having bought r13 rickets — in those days you sou Id qef reserved seats for the evening porformarce- I said alright, get me two tickets. He couldnf+ get two near their tickets, their seats, so t had to net two which were* a few rows forward b# sSaMs. And t recall there was a terrible movie, terrible film,
"Bad Bascomb" with Wallace Berry. Sure enough eight minutes a*rcr the film was on, the cinema was blown up by gelignite. Fortunately for us, upstairs in the stall, I mean the balcony. And the chandeliers started falling. ( was wearing a pair of blue slacks, which turned white with all the pIaster, My eyeglasses disappeared completely. Fortunate Iv, they were blown forward to smithereens. In those days no one could leave a cinema before the performance ended. Because of security regulations, you had to leave a passport and identify card. We went through the glass doors that were locked, vou see, took Ann out.
She didn't know what nad happened: hac never heard a bomb In her life
in Sandy Creek. ‘When she saw the bodies being cartea by the ambulances she fainted on me. The Brazil!Iar coffee store, across was a mac­ro f i cent 0; ace *n Those days, I ho on hr her a brandy. r- h- came +oo«
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didn't know. She hadn't told him we were going to the cinema.
It turned out Howard had been looking for us in every police station and every Hospital in town. So that was the story of the Metro bomb i ng.
'46 and '47 were, I'd say, fairly eventful years in Cairo around the University. February '46 witnessed perhaps the largest demonstration Egypt has ever known, other than the fungeral—other than Nasser's funeral or besides Nasser's funeral. This was the demonstration for evacuation, when they attacked the Kasr el NiI barracks, and we were alI closeted on the old, in the oId campus, with mach i ne gun bu I Iets, you know, riddling the wall which used to be the Bursar's Office, and so on, facing Kasr el Aini. We had to feed a lot of people that day in the University, people who did not live on the premises. There was an old man Am Ahmed, who was our farash, who'd been there, I suppose, since Cleland came along with Watson to put the pi ace together. And he seemed to have organized the meals for that particular day.
Another demonstration, I think in '48, was a bad one, because Morris, who was teaching a senior course on English Literature, was giving this course, which I attended, in what used to be the Blue Room, where the Alumni office is now. And he was, as I think I've already remarked, rather deaf, and as he was reading, I believe it's Wordsworth, "The World is Too Much With us”, two rocks came straight through the windows, and people were screaming "help us, give us water". Some people had been killed, but Morris kept on reading "The World is Too Much With us". However, we emptied the room with alacrity, and we all moved to the cafeteria, which used to be under the present little coffee shop, or under the library in those days.
There was something I would say, false or fraudulent about Badeau in those days, who tended to solicit all the little Palestinians, rather18 -
abject Iy. He had no interest in the fore i gners, not really. I suppose one should sympathize with his position. There was this Palestine problem on. But I thought the solicitation was un­necessary because these were not i nfIuenti a I people anyway.
I recall the arrival of such performers at Ewart Hall as the La Scala of Milan, a great soprano corolatura Maria Canelia, whom we used to nickname Maria Canalia, Tito Gobi, Angelica Ducal Ii, people like Charly Rene. I first saw and heard, in the flesh, Edith Piaf.
And the system then, which was presided over by this rather shrewd, magnificently moustached or be-moustached Greek, Stephen Cocaves is; he was in charge of buildings and grounds—the system was that could usher for all these performances and get a guest ticket, a free guest ticket, and there were usher's boxes in back of the stalls of Ewart Memorial Hall, where our various little girl friends, mistresses, or what have you, would come. And I suppose that one of the most attractive features of AUC in those days were the series in Ewart Hall, which consisted of excellent artists from overseas. The Israel — what is now the Israel Philharmonic—used to be called the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, used to come to Ewart yearly, and give several performances up until the so called, or rather up until the famous Partition Resolution in the UN over Palestine in November 1947.
Another epochal memory was, of course, the cholera epidemic in 1947, which started in the Spring, no in the Summer, and we could not resume the term until November sometime. And there was the old campus; every corner had a bowl of permanganate where we dipped our hands. It was very much under control by then.
There was - sports were quite an activity, I’d say, in M7-’49.This Armenian showed up as a coach, I forget his name, who had trained some of the best track and field athletes, but also the fact that AUC was basketball champion in Egypt for three years running was quite an achievement. It was such a small community really. As I say the entering class was something like 30 or 35.
The whole college, I don't think, had more than 150 people. That
we always managed to organize ourselves in cars, or whatever it
was, and travel with these teams. There was even a swi mmi ng team. Fikri, an Egyptian graduate of the Physical Education College in Cairo University, or in Cairo, was the football coach. His one problem was he could not communicate in English at all. His other probIem was he wasn't too bright. I remember also, the man who died, Farag, who taught most of us how to play tennis.
I recall that when Lai la Hammamsy, better known then as Lai la Shukry, had come down with a degree - she and Wadat were really contemporaries - in 1946. She got her degree in 1946. She became sports mistress for the women for a couple of years before she went
to Bryn Mawr college to get an MA in 1949, no '50. So she was, I
think, sports mistress for two or three years, plus doing all kinds of other odd jobs. There was apart from Lai la, several of her class­mates that went to American, like Wadat went to Radcliffe, and I think to Harvard, too. I'm not certain. Anyway, some place. I remember a girl who wasn't too bright in Journalism, who was also a colleague of Hammamsy's, called Khairiva Khairy, but who had a most attractive personality. She was very popular, and she is now married to Aly Amin, one of the twin brothers of the old Akhbar el Yom, who lives in England. There was a delicate Egyptian, Sophie Iskander, who wasn't too bright either, and she went to America. There were,- 20 -
I’m talking now about Hammarnsy's classmates, not mine. They were a couple of years ahead of us. Well Taiata Hussein, who eventually became Kuwaiti Ambassador in Washington for several years. Now he is Ambassador in Morocco. There was Akram Istambuii, a great foot- bail player, who became manager of the Arab Bank and married a girl called Jeanette something from Maadi. There was Kama! Abdul Monheim, who was a year ahead of me, who’s now President of the Pepsi Cola Company in Khartoum, and a great sportsman, a great wit, had an immense sense of humour, a Sudanese.
There were also the short-term characters, among them most notorious, having been, of course, Riley, an ex-marine, who was, I believe, a riflemen for several years somewhere in some bloody hole in the Pacific. Riley arrived to teach a bit of everything. He was I think, 6 foot 5, huge man, very fair in complexion. He was a contrast to a man who arrived with him, like Howard Root, to teach Philosophy, very serious, very skinny, and for an American, relatively short. Riley was the genera! factotum. He organized parties, taught a bit of psychology, ran a bit of sports, kept the footballs and the basketballs—I mean literally the balls. He got himself a girlfriend who was as old as his mother, a woman called Beatrice who taught at the community school in Maadi, mad as hell but a charming woman. Must have been in her 60s.
Now obviously the relationship was platonic, because it was my distinct impression that old Riley, at least from the way he talked to us, where we a I I lived. He had a charming kind of vocabulary, referring to girls as "wenches" or "bitches". He was very popular, without being of any consequence, or of any significance, or of any weight.
Ther e was a rather precious little boy who arrived to teach20
English called Johnson from Allegheny College, the son of real estate people, I suppose, who owned something like two dozen shirts and three dozen jackets and coats and so on. Very elegantly dressed, but very collegeish. Now I don't think he knew anything.
He was just a nice bloke.
I would say that the people who taught my generation English or gave them an interest in literature or gave them an interest in American history were people like Schuman, Morris, Root, to some extent HarrelI Beck. He never taught us, but he was around to be talked with, or to be talked to, or to converse, to chat. Badeau had very little to do with the foreigners. Badeau, one could see in his face, was a terribly ambitious man, and obviously he became ambassador one day here. I used to call him the Egyptian ambassador to Washington in Cairo. Howard was close to the students in a sort of Learian way. Howard used to produce some excellent plays, because there were students who could speak English with some diction, i remember annually, very vaguely, they used to produce somd kind of Pharonic performance, where we'd all come out, you know, with a loin cloth or something. But this was Naamani's little show, and the leading lady, I understand, was a lady he'd held the torch for for years, some ex-AUCian.

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THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO
AUC HISTORY ON TAPE .
P.J. Va+ikiotis
Interviewed by Dr. Lawrence R. Murphy, January 6, 1973.
Murphy: This is an interview with Professor P.J. Vati kiotis.
It is recorded in his room at the Garden City House on January 6, 1973. The interviewer is Lawrence R. Murphy, Professor.
Vatikiotis, who was a student at the American University in Cairo is now a noted historian of the Middle East at the School of African and Oriental Studies, London University.
Vatikiotis: Now I came to AUC—I joined, 1 enrolled—in 1944
in the autumn, and at that time, of course, the war had receded from North Africa so that this particular part of the world was no longer in danger from the Axis. The war was already in Sicily and in Europe, Western Europe. There were perhaps thirty or thirty-five entering freshman that year. I would say the vast majority, about 80%, were not Arabic speaking. By that I don't mean they did not speak Arabic, but they were foreigners. A large contingent, one of the largest contingents, of Greeks had come in. I'd say about twelve to fourteen, some still in uniform. There were some Armenians, The Greeks were mainly from Abbott School, except for me who had come from an English public school in Palestine. There were several English Mission School from Cairo, and English School, a few Lycee, and many, of course, Armenian high school people.
I would say that the enrollment was evenly divided. In those days there was no choice of courses. You took a Social Science course degree, or degree course. You took a Science degree course;2
that is math, physics, chemistry, etc. You took a Journalism course. And that was it. We did have certa i n papers in common, that is certain subjects that we all had to take, like we all in Freshman year took chemistry; that was compulsory. We all had to take English. The difference, of course, between then and now is that those of us who had come from English schools were quite literate in English. Those who had come from the Greek schools, of course, were not as proficient. Even the people from the lycee were fairly prof i cient in Eng I!sh. I recaI I that wo took an aciuaI course in English writing, both in terms of essay writing and ‘whatever else is Involved, tie took a course In the English and American short story, which was a IIterature course. I suppose, and I recall that the people who taught us these were Leila Doss, who had just come down from Oxford, or had come down from Oxford, I think, before that, and Schuman, the man who eventually wrote a novel after his stay here called Cairo Concerto. Vie all took a basic philosophy course with a man called Smith, who subsequently retired and went to Wooster College in Ohio. Smith was an Englishman born in Tunis, attractive man, married to an American, with one daughter. Yet a very-rigid man, terribly religious, but extremely shrewd. Lousy for a philosophy professor or teacher, because he could take no argument. And this we found rather enervating, or annoying, and many of us who had come from the Greek background, especially having been to Greek high school, had had philosophy and were used to be able to corner him once in a while. And I remember hefd flush, turn terribly red, and get very argumentative, and try to shout us down.The other fixture in the University was a magnificent teacher, who was very very wise but must have stopped reading twenty years before we arrived, was a man called Marcel Kiven, the Belgian. He taught all the so-called economics, and what-have-you throughout the col Iege. Kiven was—there was an amb i volent relationship with Kiven. The students liked him, yet liked him in a superficial way.
Then there was that great character from Sweden. Madame Berg, and I must say, although Berg, being old from the University of Upsala and somewhat decrepid at that time, must have been a beautiful woman in her day. Was extremely well read in the history of political thought. And it is unfortunate that many students used to take her as a joke, but I might say that 1 got my first interest in the study of politics from Madame Berg.
The other difficulty was that here were all these foreigners, they had to take Arabic somehow, because it was something to do, of course, with the situation of the University in the country. Most people who came from English schools had taken Latin; I had taken Arabic, a lot of the students, of course, from the Lycees, from the foreign schools, from the Armenian school, and so on^ knew how to speak Arabic, and perhaps knew how to make out the alphabet and read a few words, but they were not proficient in Arabic. And this was the joke of the college. They'd send them to these various special classes, led or taught by people like Sheikh Ahmed, who was legendary, and so on. And they did damn all, really.
So we had a situation where the Oriental Studies school was teaching Arabic beautifully to a I I these outsiders, you know, or people who were specializing in Oriental study, and yet the actual students4
enrolled regularly in the college could not take proper Arabic teaching, or do proper Arabic study, basicaI Iy because they were not interested in it.
So in brief, really, you had a largely foreign body of students, which was joi ned every year at the j uri i or I eve I by a I I these little Egyptian girls who had gone to the American College for Women, usually daughters of fairly well-to-do people. They were Muslims and ex-Copts who had been converted by English or American missionaries to the more sanitized, sanitary Puritanical form of western Protestantism, where, of course, money and power lay, from the less sanitary and rather Oriental rite of the Coptic church. So these were basically the two lots of women we'd get from the American girls college. The girls who came from the English school and the English Mission School were far more intelligent, less formal education, but more literate, and much, much brighter, really. We even had an A.T.S. with us, that year,
Clarette Zukermann. She had served in the British army, was an older girl, who is now, of course, a prominent person in Israel. Her husband is the leading economic analyst and columnist of Haarif (?) newspaper called Schwartz, and she is, I think, Director of the League of Women for Israel.
There were one or two Turks whom I can't remember. There was a magnificent poet from South Arabic, the Yemen, the editor of the lead­ing newspaper in Aden, Ali Lukman, his brother Ibrahim, who subsequently became a senior civil servant in the British period in Aden. There was a rather splendid chap from Uganda, from Makerere before Makerere became a University but was only a school, Justin Zangandu Zake, who subsequently became an anthropolog ist trai ned in Ch icago.At that time the first batch of American short-termers began to arrive. Schuman, Morris, Riley, Howard Root in Philosophy from California, Harrell Beck eventually, Bud Bloomquist who played more basket ball than teach—I think he taught public speaking or some such nefarious thing--but there was always of course, Worth Howard, who took a generic interest in everything, but who eventually taught a class in drama; drama things like Ibsen and so on. Morris taught eighteenth and nineteenth century English literature, and was quite good at it. Schuman was too drunk to teach; he was an alcoholi by then. Badeau taught us philosophy eventually, and it wasn't very good philosophy, because basically he was a theological seminary pro­duct, but he was a very, very good teacher.
I cannot say anything about the Arabic teachers, because I didn't take Arabic at the college. I went elsewhere.
Now we also began to receive then many Palestinian students.
They did not increase in number until after the war. I would say about ’45, '46 they came in force. Jordanians began to come in force. We had many Ethiopians. And the Palestinians, of course, became an i dent i f i abIe group because of what was going on in Pa Iestine The fact remains that the proportion of Egyptian students in my time from '44 to '48 remained very smaI I.
Now most of the foreigners who came to AUC, if they were resi­dents of Egypt. I suppose, came because they couIdn't go to Europe in 1944, not that easily, or overseas. Secondly, because obviously coming from schools like the English school, lycee, the Armenian school, they couldn't without a Tawgihiyya very easily go into one of the Egyptian state universities. As for the Arabs who came, if they were Egypt i ans, they may have been peopIe who could afford thefees, people who may not have had the required cumulative mark average to get into the Egyptian university.
The girls, I suppose, who came from the American girls college, they just carried in thi s sort of exported American educat ionaI pattern. The Palestinians and, let us say, the Western Arabs who came, one might ask why they didn’t go to the AUB. Well the AUB was terribly expensive. Beirut itself was expensive. They may not have had a place there, and basically for such reasons, although most of them were moneyed. In other words, they were not people who had financial difficulty. I came basically because it was, Cairo was, the cheapest place to live in the Middle East. I had a free ticket on the raiI ways, first class, because of my father having been a civil servant in the Mandate Government in Palestine. That meant that the trip was free through the desert of Sinai. I think I must have lived on a maximum of three pounds a month in those days, and Cairo to me was the, in terms of culture and tradition, and I don’t mean modern Cairo,
Soliman Pasha and Kasr el Nil but Islamic Cairo, really was the re­presentative city of the Islamic world, a I though one can argue in those days Damascus was one, too. It was a place tolearn Arabic be­yond the point which I had reached. And as I say, I suppose, if Europe were open to us then, few of us would have thought of coming to the American University in Cairo.
And I suppose there is also a sub-conscious reason. Those of us who followed the news, those of us who were I iterate enough to read, realized or rather foresaw that the academic bonanza was going to open up in one direction, and that meant the United States.And it's rather uncanny that most of my generation of students from the AUC somehow or other went that way. This is, they went to America either for a short period of permanently. I was one of the ones who went there permanently, only to leave America for England again permanently sixteen years later. But it is true to say that most of us got fellowships or some arrangement or other and went to America after, because the degree from AUC for some reason or another was recognized in the United States while it wasn’t recognized in Egypt.
Let me give you, for instance, some examples of what happened to these students. A man like Balidjian (?), probably the brightest member of our undergraduate years, became eventually a consulting chemical engineer in America. He was apparently a brilliant mathematician and chemist, and I think he and I were the youngest members of the entering Freshman year. I was 16 and he was 16, but I can't remember what the difference in months was, in birthdays.
Ida Chivarjian (?) an Armenian from Cairo, whose parents owned the flour mills in Egypt, was also I think was young as we were. She is now either headmistress or deputy headmistress of one of the largest comprehensive schools in Surrey in England. She was also, It seems,
3 brilliant mathematician. She came from the English Mission School. Ricky Mihaeiof (?), whose father had a biological laboratory, a bio-chemical laboratory, here, she ended up, I believe, in Switzerland. I don't know what she's done with her life, but she was very able. Clarette Zuckermann, the A.T.S. girl, was extremely able, she was in the Social Sciences. George Kakouris (?) whose father was a grocer in Sakakini, opposte the American Girls College, is now the leadinglibrarian in Greece. He went to Chicago after AUC and was trained in library science, after having taken a degree in physics and math.
The same I would say app!ies to people like Richard Aiey, who went to Britain, not to Ameri ca, and qua Ii f i ed as a chemical eng i neer. from the Un i vers i ty of London, and is now a chartered chemi caI engi neer in Milan, the President of an environment and pollution company,
The other day, walking in the Muski here in Cairo, I ran into a chap I hadn't seen since we came down from the college in 1948, a man called Boulos Abd-iI-Matik, one of the genuine Egyptian Copts, who went to America, and worked for Voice of America for many, many years. He took a journalism degree, and he is now the first secretary in charge of the press at the American Embassy in Beirut. Boulos was apparently a successful journalist as far as the Voice of America is concerned, and eventually joined the American foreign service.
Several other people: Gerald Arthun (?) who eventually married
Ida Chivarjian, who is also in Surrey, a Senior French master of a school. He and Morgnello, an Italian boy from Cairo, were, I think the champions of you I a due (?) in Egypt in 1945 and '46 and they were on the national team of you I a huit, the rowing team of eight.
He's now, Morinello, managing Air Canada in the north of Italy.
There was a problem in the sense that here we were in an American university. Most of us were diverse foreigners, but the common language was, of course, French.
The library in those days was terribly small. It was where this student cafeteria is now on the main campus—coffee shop, or whatever it is. And I remember there was one chap there whose still w i th the I i brary, Nicola Geo rge, who was on the c i rcuI at ion desk.
Behind him sat this man who was like the owl of Minerva, called Kamal, who used to do the catalogueing, and sort of once in a while shoutat all of us because we were either sort of fondling the girls or talking loudly. But I must say that the few books that existed were very well read.
There were contingents of Greeks from Suez and from Port Tewfiq, the whole canal area, all of whom, I would say, without exception, went overseas as professionaIs or became professionaIs mainly in the applied sciences. Some of them became lawyers. There was one chap, I remember, from Jerusalem, a Jew called Amnon Corkidy (?) who took a journalism degree and now, I understand, is a millionaire twice over in America by having changed his name to Barnes. Fuad el Hussainy, who entered with us, from the Hussainy family in Jerusalem, the mufti's family, but remotely related to it. After '48 joined the foreign service of Saudi Arabia, and I ran into him in Rabat two years ago as the Minister Plenipotentiary of Saudi Arabia in Morocco.
So that there is no doubt that this was a transient place for these people. To this extent one might say that the function of AUC in those days was an original function. It gave people the kind of window, which was a totally new window, in con+rast to the long­standing French window, that the Egyptians had. The British have had their exported public schools here like Victoria, English School Heliopolis, and so on, but they never had a university-level outfit, or semi-university level. One thing one observes is that the vast majority of people, especially the males, who went to AUC in the war years and the immediate post-war years have, I think, because of the accident of the second world war, been people who had to be purposeful. In other words, they had to go do something and get out. This having been the case, most of them have endec up doing something.
Many of us would look back and regret that the qualify and level
- 9 -
10 -
of the college curriculum was not as it should have been. On the other hand, we did not regret this, as I say, transient or transformational function that-the college performed, or played.
One notices, for instance, in the case of Flora Risk, who was with us. Her father was the Bursar or the Cashier, whatever it was at the college. She eventually became a leading personality in the field of Middle Eastern studies as they were beginning in America in the '50s when the financial bonanza — you know in American universities, creating programs and all the wasted money since that time which produced a very small ball of string, with regard to who knows the Middle East and who doesn't. Flora is the girl who helped organize one of the best and leading Middle East collections at Widener (?) under Gibb.
One recalls that there was this almost automatic, subconscious, dynamism that when one finished AUC one left, crossed the sea, crossed the ocean—sometimes one didn't cross the ocean, stayed in Europe~--and left.
Now there was also the environment within which all this occurred. Palestine for the Palestinian Arabs was no more; there­fore, they couldn't go back there. Some of them tended to populate the civil service positions and let us say advisory positions in the up-and-coming Arab states, let us say in the peninsula or else­where. Other things were happening in Egypt. Those of us who had the slightest perceptiveness could see that as far as the foreign communities were concerned in Egypt, the game for them was up. That they would have to face up to a phenomonen which, although it began to gain momentum in the 19th century, culminated in our time in a sort of horizontal integration of everything, the liberation move-merit, which swept everything in its way, and tended to sweep those who either could not, of course, either assimi!ate or tolerate the new conditions. So the second accident of the environment, the trends that were occurring in, let us say, Egypt itself and other Middle Eastern countries, tended to push these foreigners outside, never to return.
One would also suspect that the young Americans who came as short- termers here, right after the war, were in my view to put it frankly and bluntly a greater asset to the college than—let me put it this way— than the short-termers that have been coming in the last tenyears. For hefvery simple reason that they had no motivation of professional advancement. The war was over. A lot of them had been in the war.
They came purely and simply to teach for three years, and also enjoy themselves. So their teaching was, of course, varied. But some of them like Harrell Beck, Howard Root, Schuman, alcohol or no a I coho I, were bloody good. Morris was excellent. There were people who had the time to read, and because they read, of course, they had something to say in class. When I say they had no professional advancement motives, in other words they had not been professionalized yet. Whereas, the youngsters 'who come today, they come either because it's very difficult to get a post in a good university in America or because they think this will lead them into something called an expertise on the Middle East, to take back to selI it like good con artists, for instance, or bad con artists, to some unsuspecting small college or university in America, This means that they have to 'work in something which gives the appearance of research, but which is not quite research.
In this sense, I would say the place has lost something. Mind you, to be fair, the environment today precludes the kind of openness that a short-termer had in those days.12
As for the over-administrative superstructuring of the uni­versity, that, too, is a loss, although it was an i nevi tab Ie de­velopment. I never saw paper going around in my days. People would do things by word of mouth. One could see Howard walking around the small grounds of that old campus, you see, telling people what was going to happen next afternoon, or thereabouts. Now I suppose there is more of a formal or formalistic structure, by people who really have no genuine interest in Egypt or in AUC.
The old-timers like Howard, who died last year, like Vandersall, whose still living, or Ii ke Cl el I and, who died also earlier this year, was that they were here for the duration. They painted the place.
They swept the place. They worked in it. In other words, this was their life job; they were dedicated to the place. They may have been limited in their capacities, both intellectual and academic abilities. Nevertheless....
I think they may have misjudged the temperment of my generation. One must bear in mind that a lot of these people came out because they were inclined towards a missionary kind of activity. They were good people, and yet they were still of the generation that felt they had "the word". They were not obnoxious about this. There were compulsory assemblies with the odd prayer, the odd lesson, the odd preaching. I would suggest, not untastefully done, not clumsily done. It was a means of communication in those days. It was a means, let's say, for myseIf and some other bloke to go in with a gi rlfriend and sort of sit snugly together in the back of Ewart Hall. And yet this hung in the background. I myself, to some extent, resented this, because I knew that they had never converted a Muslim or a Jew to Christ­ianity. They always converted people from other Christian rites.13 -
1 don't think themselves had ever done any conversion. It was clear in the case of people like Badeau, less in people like Howard, whereas VandersalI and Neva, himself, Van and Neva were extremely devout and religious people. They were so shy and yet too pleasant, genuine and helpful, that one didn't mind their religiosity, which could have been, of course, oppressive.
Van ran a glee club, which at sometime, at least in my years, was at its peak, splendid group. Wadat Said was in it, myself and a few others. Neva gave us all our immunizations. She was a registered nurse, as well as sometimes doubling as a vice squad, or a one-woman vice squad to make certain that we weren't dabbling with all the little virgins on the campus.
And yet the girls who were with us were more mature as women than they are today, I think. They had character. They had personality,
Some of them were physically attractive. But basically most of them quite intelligent. Oh, there was the odd stupid one.
Vandersall became a legend for two things: his straight-forwardness,
and his awkwardness. He never let anyone down, once he had given him his word, because Vandersall did everything in this college. One time he was even registrar. He'd brew his own coffee when he and Neva would have their brown-bag lunch in the chemistry laboratory, 1 believe, no the physics laboratory. And across the way was old Selim Salaama, God rest his soul, who was the technician in charge of the chemistry lab­oratory. And you'd ask him "what's your name", and he'd say "Sleem Sima".
Naamani was always in the wings somewhere, fixing his racing form every morning, chain smoking, and eyeing the women. .14
VandersalI taught a beautiful course, literally beautiful course, after he'd come back from having worked as one of the myriad scientists or physicists on the Manhattan project. He taught a course called The History of Science, which I think is no longer taught at AUC—a rather stupid, retrogressive step— all of us had to take the History of Science, and now that I teach the odd seminar on the relationship between the Philosophy of Science and politics, find that a lot of things, before I started reading philosophy of science, that I remmbered came from VandersalI's course.
He kept on looking at his watch and the clock in a lecture, theatre room really, in the back of the old building where the laboratories were, and the class began always on the hour, and when the hour was up to the second, he'd shut the rooftof the door. Anyone who walked in after he had shut the door was simply not allowed entry. VandersalI also ran the Geological Club, andhe'd take people all over the place, Sakarra, the Mokattum, you name it, looking for all kinds of granite and basalt and what have you. Wadat Said was one of his great friends and admirers. I mean, he liked Wadat so much that we were afraid that he was really infatuated. He used to call her "Gazelle" because Wadat was a good walker. One would go to his home for dinner or for lunch, and he'd suddenly, know know, his eyes would water, and he'd get flush in the face, and bring out this dusty, ancient little record—worn out, an old '78 probably done in the '20s— and he'd put it on this little grinder, and low and behold, his Wooster College song would come on, and he would sing. VandersalI would always begin conducting--before he'd conduct the glee club— whether it was rehersa I or something else, he always kept time withhis thumb, andhe literally was the man that one can say he was alI thumbs, because he was so shy his two thumbs were IiteraI Iy up.
Howard, was a great garden party giver. He was invoIved with Music and the Arts. Actually the secretary of Music and the Arts during the war, right after the war, was my wife, or the girt who is now my wife, who was with the British Council then. He knew myriads of British officers during the war: he'd organize concerts and theater
for them, plays, He read the Christmas Story every Christmas, when we had a huge dinner, practically with black ties; yes, it was with black tie. 1 mean the Christmas Story, the Dickens story. Muriel would arrange the flower pots, and Muriel would play the piano. Muriel would fix the banan bread. Muriel would always be in the background. She was a retiring, reserved, retieient woman, of great personality and character. I understand that she and Howard met when when one day Howard as a youngster went to her home to sell her a temperance.
In 1946-47 Muriel's niece, an Ann Sprague, the daughter of Muriel's brother Wendell, from an unknown little small town up in upstate New York came to spend the year with them. She was a sophomore andsomehow, i met this girl, and thought that it would be a good idea for her to see Egypt that year. I saw a lot of the Howards then, whenever I'd go either to take Ann back in the small hours of the morning or pick her up in the early hours of the evening.
And I recall on the 6th of May, 1947, it was the anniversary of Farouk's accession to the throne. They used to always have beautiful lights on the bridges. The Nile was magnificent that night. And Ann had asked whether I would show her the lights, and I said that I'd gladiy do so. In those days I was living in diggs in a pension called Litoral above the Metro cinema really or just before,K -
run by a Madame Usa, some Italian woman. And my roommate was a boy called seorge I I 1 ades(?) , pro car; I v the most sifted, talented a t h I ete to have come to ABC. He subsequent I y wen r fo Co I umb i a, Missouri and stayed there. ?~e? s st‘II there, he was dating the daughter ef an American naval casta * n, wno was need of NAMRU. Her name was Marilyn, someth inn or other, Spencer or some such Thing, They wanted to go to hetcinema tnat night, and George asked me if I wanted tickets, I sale no at first, Ha If an hour later, he having bought r13 rickets — in those days you sou Id qef reserved seats for the evening porformarce- I said alright, get me two tickets. He couldnf+ get two near their tickets, their seats, so t had to net two which were* a few rows forward b# sSaMs. And t recall there was a terrible movie, terrible film,
"Bad Bascomb" with Wallace Berry. Sure enough eight minutes a*rcr the film was on, the cinema was blown up by gelignite. Fortunately for us, upstairs in the stall, I mean the balcony. And the chandeliers started falling. ( was wearing a pair of blue slacks, which turned white with all the pIaster, My eyeglasses disappeared completely. Fortunate Iv, they were blown forward to smithereens. In those days no one could leave a cinema before the performance ended. Because of security regulations, you had to leave a passport and identify card. We went through the glass doors that were locked, vou see, took Ann out.
She didn't know what nad happened: hac never heard a bomb In her life
in Sandy Creek. ‘When she saw the bodies being cartea by the ambulances she fainted on me. The Brazil!Iar coffee store, across was a mac­ro f i cent 0; ace *n Those days, I ho on hr her a brandy. r- h- came +oo«
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didn't know. She hadn't told him we were going to the cinema.
It turned out Howard had been looking for us in every police station and every Hospital in town. So that was the story of the Metro bomb i ng.
'46 and '47 were, I'd say, fairly eventful years in Cairo around the University. February '46 witnessed perhaps the largest demonstration Egypt has ever known, other than the fungeral—other than Nasser's funeral or besides Nasser's funeral. This was the demonstration for evacuation, when they attacked the Kasr el NiI barracks, and we were alI closeted on the old, in the oId campus, with mach i ne gun bu I Iets, you know, riddling the wall which used to be the Bursar's Office, and so on, facing Kasr el Aini. We had to feed a lot of people that day in the University, people who did not live on the premises. There was an old man Am Ahmed, who was our farash, who'd been there, I suppose, since Cleland came along with Watson to put the pi ace together. And he seemed to have organized the meals for that particular day.
Another demonstration, I think in '48, was a bad one, because Morris, who was teaching a senior course on English Literature, was giving this course, which I attended, in what used to be the Blue Room, where the Alumni office is now. And he was, as I think I've already remarked, rather deaf, and as he was reading, I believe it's Wordsworth, "The World is Too Much With us”, two rocks came straight through the windows, and people were screaming "help us, give us water". Some people had been killed, but Morris kept on reading "The World is Too Much With us". However, we emptied the room with alacrity, and we all moved to the cafeteria, which used to be under the present little coffee shop, or under the library in those days.
There was something I would say, false or fraudulent about Badeau in those days, who tended to solicit all the little Palestinians, rather18 -
abject Iy. He had no interest in the fore i gners, not really. I suppose one should sympathize with his position. There was this Palestine problem on. But I thought the solicitation was un­necessary because these were not i nfIuenti a I people anyway.
I recall the arrival of such performers at Ewart Hall as the La Scala of Milan, a great soprano corolatura Maria Canelia, whom we used to nickname Maria Canalia, Tito Gobi, Angelica Ducal Ii, people like Charly Rene. I first saw and heard, in the flesh, Edith Piaf.
And the system then, which was presided over by this rather shrewd, magnificently moustached or be-moustached Greek, Stephen Cocaves is; he was in charge of buildings and grounds—the system was that could usher for all these performances and get a guest ticket, a free guest ticket, and there were usher's boxes in back of the stalls of Ewart Memorial Hall, where our various little girl friends, mistresses, or what have you, would come. And I suppose that one of the most attractive features of AUC in those days were the series in Ewart Hall, which consisted of excellent artists from overseas. The Israel — what is now the Israel Philharmonic—used to be called the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, used to come to Ewart yearly, and give several performances up until the so called, or rather up until the famous Partition Resolution in the UN over Palestine in November 1947.
Another epochal memory was, of course, the cholera epidemic in 1947, which started in the Spring, no in the Summer, and we could not resume the term until November sometime. And there was the old campus; every corner had a bowl of permanganate where we dipped our hands. It was very much under control by then.
There was - sports were quite an activity, I’d say, in M7-’49.This Armenian showed up as a coach, I forget his name, who had trained some of the best track and field athletes, but also the fact that AUC was basketball champion in Egypt for three years running was quite an achievement. It was such a small community really. As I say the entering class was something like 30 or 35.
The whole college, I don't think, had more than 150 people. That
we always managed to organize ourselves in cars, or whatever it
was, and travel with these teams. There was even a swi mmi ng team. Fikri, an Egyptian graduate of the Physical Education College in Cairo University, or in Cairo, was the football coach. His one problem was he could not communicate in English at all. His other probIem was he wasn't too bright. I remember also, the man who died, Farag, who taught most of us how to play tennis.
I recall that when Lai la Hammamsy, better known then as Lai la Shukry, had come down with a degree - she and Wadat were really contemporaries - in 1946. She got her degree in 1946. She became sports mistress for the women for a couple of years before she went
to Bryn Mawr college to get an MA in 1949, no '50. So she was, I
think, sports mistress for two or three years, plus doing all kinds of other odd jobs. There was apart from Lai la, several of her class­mates that went to American, like Wadat went to Radcliffe, and I think to Harvard, too. I'm not certain. Anyway, some place. I remember a girl who wasn't too bright in Journalism, who was also a colleague of Hammamsy's, called Khairiva Khairy, but who had a most attractive personality. She was very popular, and she is now married to Aly Amin, one of the twin brothers of the old Akhbar el Yom, who lives in England. There was a delicate Egyptian, Sophie Iskander, who wasn't too bright either, and she went to America. There were,- 20 -
I’m talking now about Hammarnsy's classmates, not mine. They were a couple of years ahead of us. Well Taiata Hussein, who eventually became Kuwaiti Ambassador in Washington for several years. Now he is Ambassador in Morocco. There was Akram Istambuii, a great foot- bail player, who became manager of the Arab Bank and married a girl called Jeanette something from Maadi. There was Kama! Abdul Monheim, who was a year ahead of me, who’s now President of the Pepsi Cola Company in Khartoum, and a great sportsman, a great wit, had an immense sense of humour, a Sudanese.
There were also the short-term characters, among them most notorious, having been, of course, Riley, an ex-marine, who was, I believe, a riflemen for several years somewhere in some bloody hole in the Pacific. Riley arrived to teach a bit of everything. He was I think, 6 foot 5, huge man, very fair in complexion. He was a contrast to a man who arrived with him, like Howard Root, to teach Philosophy, very serious, very skinny, and for an American, relatively short. Riley was the genera! factotum. He organized parties, taught a bit of psychology, ran a bit of sports, kept the footballs and the basketballs—I mean literally the balls. He got himself a girlfriend who was as old as his mother, a woman called Beatrice who taught at the community school in Maadi, mad as hell but a charming woman. Must have been in her 60s.
Now obviously the relationship was platonic, because it was my distinct impression that old Riley, at least from the way he talked to us, where we a I I lived. He had a charming kind of vocabulary, referring to girls as "wenches" or "bitches". He was very popular, without being of any consequence, or of any significance, or of any weight.
Ther e was a rather precious little boy who arrived to teach20
English called Johnson from Allegheny College, the son of real estate people, I suppose, who owned something like two dozen shirts and three dozen jackets and coats and so on. Very elegantly dressed, but very collegeish. Now I don't think he knew anything.
He was just a nice bloke.
I would say that the people who taught my generation English or gave them an interest in literature or gave them an interest in American history were people like Schuman, Morris, Root, to some extent HarrelI Beck. He never taught us, but he was around to be talked with, or to be talked to, or to converse, to chat. Badeau had very little to do with the foreigners. Badeau, one could see in his face, was a terribly ambitious man, and obviously he became ambassador one day here. I used to call him the Egyptian ambassador to Washington in Cairo. Howard was close to the students in a sort of Learian way. Howard used to produce some excellent plays, because there were students who could speak English with some diction, i remember annually, very vaguely, they used to produce somd kind of Pharonic performance, where we'd all come out, you know, with a loin cloth or something. But this was Naamani's little show, and the leading lady, I understand, was a lady he'd held the torch for for years, some ex-AUCian.